Saturday, August 6, 2011

Once again we have a small poultry with seven hens and a cock. The hens have started laying eggs. A new platform is being made to put the hen cage. The platform so the rats and snakes don’t dine on the hens. Shanta our nursery teacher has found a new passion, doing masonary work almost everyday. The cock crows regularly at 5.45 am and everyday the kids visit them and watch them eagerly, jumping, fighting and contemplate.

Shanta and others working diligently to construct the hen cage

Sowing is complete. The amazon group had an English lesson on the farm and are trying hard to remember words like sorghum and millets and ploughing. Study has become regular for everybody. The water project is over and we are thinking of preparing a play on the theme of independence or more aptly - in dependence. The senior students said that they want to observe the weather but chickened out when they realized that it meant recording a lot of things everyday. Does anyone know where to get a hygrometer to meausure humidity ? Also they want to know how the groundwater got collected inside the earth. They also calculated the volume of a drop and the amount of water wasted in one hour from the water tank.

learning is live...

There was a lot of frisbee playing in the week with the visitors Adam(Canada) and Nihal(Bangalore) and the INSPIRE group – 9 NRI children from the US, spending a month in India visiting NGOs.

fris! fris!

Pumpkins, beans, gourds and ladyfinger have grown. We have planted about 50 papaya plants prepared in our inhouse nursery. Lakhs of subabool plants have grown every where. Our weeding strategy is to first weed around the vegetable plant. The rest of the space will be weeded after about 10 days when there is one or two leaves in the subabool. This will provide precious nitrogen diet to the plants. Right now we are preparing the flower beds to add a dash of colour to the green.

There was a random guy from Rajasthan, from some company who came and showed paper cutting techniques and croche work. His prize was that he sold off a few needles to the kids. It seems they are a group of about 50 young boys going around the village schools.

One of our bulls was not well. He had stopped eating. Now he is allright and is grazing. The other bull banged his horns into the cow’s head (his mother), breaking a horn. This led to much consternation as the cow is due to deliver in a month.

Finally after a month the climbing ladder for children has been made. ..and three snakes killed.